Subject nationalities of the German Alliance (with a map drawn from German sources)

SUBJECT
TIONALITIES

of ifiB

RMAN ALLIANCE

»tK a. Mokp cLn&j^ fronvGermaiv Sources)

CASSELL AND COMPANY LIMITED
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1917

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SUBJECT NATIONALITIES

OF THE

GERMAN ALLIANCE

WHEN Eevolutionary Russia proclaimed, as her pro-
gramme for a peace-settlement, " No annexations or
indemnities, and the right of all nationalities to determine
their own destiny," the Germans were enthusiastic about
the first clause and silent about the second. This map
explains the reason.

If " No Annexations " is interpreted as a return to the
status quo ante helium, then the Germans, Magyars, Bulgars,
and Turks will continue to rule over the seventeen subject
nationalities or fragments of nationalities which they ruled
before the war. If, on the other hand, " No Annexations "
means that no nation is to be dominated by another nation,
against its will and by the use of force, then the self-
determination of nationalities " follows as a logical con-
sequence, and a settlement on the Russian basis will deprive
the four dominant nations of Central Europe and the Near
East of the advantages they now derive from exploiting
populations totalling as much as half their own number.

The problem of the subject nationalities of the German
Alliance is a key to the present international situation. It
explains why the four nations in this alliance are banded
together, and why they are fighting, as irreconcilable
champions of the old regime, against the new spirit in
politics which has prevailed in the rest of the world.

The subject nationalities bring the German Alliance
advantages of the utmost importance — from the German
point of view. They give them just the necessary leverage

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for overthrowing national liberty everywhere and making
their ascendancy universal.

Subtract the coloured areas from the black areas on the
map, and you are left with four nations — Germans, Magyars,
Bulgars, and Turks^ — who could enter a League of Nations
as free and equal members on the same terms as the French,
British, Italians, Swiss, Belgians, or Dutch. But add the
coloured areas, and you see these four nations differentiated
from the other peoples of Europe, endowed with a tyrannical
ascendancy in a " German Empire," an " Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy," a " Bulgarian Tsardom " and an " Ottoman
Sultanate," linked together strategicaMy across the national
territory of alien subject-peoples, and banded in a sinister
league of interest, to hold their wrongful possessions and
extend them.

As conscripts, industrial workers, and taxpayers the
subject-peoples add 50 per cent, to the military strength of
the Germanic Alliance. That is sufiB.cient to explain why
that Alliance is determined to retain possession of them at
almost any price. But one cannot sum up so shortly the
consequences for the subject-peoples which this interest of
their rulers entails.

A State at war demands practically unlimited sacrifices
from the individual, and even where the interests and ideals
of State and People are identical, the sacrifice is almost
beyond bearing. But these subject-peoples are not called
upon as free men but driven like cattle by force, to sacrifice
themselves for a victory which is to rivet their shackles
more firmly than before ; and many of them are driven to
do this in a fratricidal combat with their own kin, from
whom their rulers have isolated them by an arbitrary
frontier.

The Frenchman of Lorraine and the Alsatian are driven
forward to shoot down other Frenchmen, and watch their
German fellow-soldiers committing their atrocities in France.
The Jugo-Slavs of Austria-Hungary are driven against the
Serbs — their brother Jugo-Slavs. Whole peoples have seldom

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been placed under a more monstrous compulsion, and they
show their abhorrence of it whenever the opportunity
appears. France can boast that there are more men in the
French Army to-day from Alsace and the conquered half of
Lorraine — refugees from the German tyranny or the sons of
refugees — than from any other single province of France.
The French Army has also a Polish Legion, and there are
Jugo-Slav and Tchecho-Slovak corps in the Serbian and
Russian Armies, recruited from brave men who found as
prisoners their first opportunity of volunteering to fight for
their own national cause.

The Military Command af the German Alliance takes
bloodthirsty measures against this irresistible reassertion of
national rights. When a Tchech battalion went over to the
Russians in Galicia, the sister battalion was decimated behind
the Austrian lines, and since then they have taken care to
send subject troops to fight troops that are not of their own
blood. Italians and Rumanians are sent to the Russian front ;
Tch echo-Slovaks and Jugo-Slavs to the Italian ; and Alsatians,
sent by the German staff to fight Austria's battles in Galicia
and Bulgaria's in Macedonia, have managed to make their
way into the French and Russian lines. But those who
escape are few, for the military authorities single out the
subject troops for the most exposed positions. The subject
nationalities are profitable to their masters not only while
they live but when they die, since when they die the masters
enter into their heritage. The Turks, who surpass the
Germans in "realism" and are far more indifferent to the
opinion of the world, did not leave it to the enemy to
perform the execution. They disarmed their Armenian
conscripts, drafted them into labour battalions, and massacred
them themselves.

This is what the subject nationalities of the German
Alliance suffer in war ; but the atrociousness of their treat-
ment at thie moment must not make us dwell more lightly
«on the oppression they endured in peace-time for years
before the war was made.

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This oppression took almost every conceivable form,,
from economic injustice and robbery to rape and murder.
The little circles, scattered so thickly in the map over
Germany's Polish provinces, represent the lands expropriated
from their Polish owners by an Imperial German Colonisa-
tion Commission and handed over to Germans — as ordained
by a law of the German Reichstag. The oppression of the^
Jugo-Slavs cannot be so easily represented in visual form, for
the map is on too small a scale to mark the railways, and
the administrative system of Krain, Croatia, Dalmatia, and
Bosnia is something which it takes many volumes to expose.
But the principle of Austro- Hungarian policy here is to-
isolate the Jugo-Slav provinces geographically, to retard
their economic progress, to keep them poor and divided and
uneducated, in order that they may be exploited by the
Germans and Magyars, and never come into their rights
as a nation. As for the policy of the Turks, it is summed
up in the apophthegm of a Turkish gendarme to a Danish
Red Cross Nurse during the massacres of 1915 : " First we
kill the Armenians, then the Greeks and then the Kurds."'
His superiors have completed the programme by hanging the
leaders of the Syrian Arabs; and the Arabs of the Hejaz —
which stretches away beyond the limits of the map — have
only saved themselves by taking up arms.

To sum up, the possession of subject nationalities thus
abused gives the Germanic Alliance the impulse to fight for
world-dominion, and it makes a moral breach between them
and the rest of the world. In the present war four tyrant
nations are at grips with all the free peoples in the world,,
and between them lie the peoples whom the tyrants have
enslaved.

Printed in Great Britain by Richard Tilling,
io6, Great Dover Street, London, S.E. i.